Beat Stress

Summary

Beat Stress is a technology comprising an innovative method and wearable device capable of detecting stress in 1% of the time required by standard solutions.

Once it allows the needed parameters to be collected and identified in just one or a few heartbeats (ECG signal), Beat Stress also reduces the volume of data collected and processed. These two features make Beat Stress the ideal technology to use in an online context, aligned with the increasing healthcare wearable trend.

Challenge | Opportunity

Recently, the healthcare wearable devices industry has shown signs of increasing popularity, opening numerous opportunities for different uses of the raised data. At the same time, the standard technique for stress detection based in ECG, the Window-derived Heart Rate Variability (W-HRV), is not suitable for portable and real-time applications since it requires large time interval for measurement, producing a large amount of data that requires more computational power to process.

In this sense, Beat Stress was developed to take advantage of this opportunity for a more effective method to be used in an online stress detection context since it presents the necessary time resolution and computational rapidity to be used with wearable devices.

Main Advantages

• Timely stress event prediction ability, allowing fast detection of abnormalities in cardiovascular functions;
• Very fast (beat-to-beat) and accurate stress detection;
• Reduces the computational power needed to process the measured data;
• Miniaturisation - easy to embed tiny systems, such as wearable, snap-to-skin or under skin devices.

Applications

• Health and well-being wearable devices;
• Health assessment of professionals exposed to stressful working environment (firefighters, air traffic controllers, etc);
• Accident prevention.